Free All Around Atlantis by Deborah Eisenberg Page B

technical abilities that delighted audiences. But the qualities he greatly admired and envied in other pianists—varieties of a profound musicianship which focussed the attention on the ear, hearing, rather than on the hand, executing—were ones he lacked. He practiced, he struggled, he cultivated patience, and he was rewarded—minimally. By just the faintest flicker of heat in his crystalline touch.
    His curls, pallor, and technique lost some of their brilliance; his audience was distracted by newcomers and dispersed, and a sudden increase in the velocity of the earth’s spin dumped Shapiro into his thirty-eighth year. Aaron Shapiro . Caroline had been starry-eyed when they’d met, although by that time he’d already moved out to the margin of the city and was beginning to take on private students, startlingly untalented children who at best thought of the piano as a defective substitute for something electronic. Gradually he ceased to be the sort of pianist who might expect to make recordings, give important concerts, be interviewed, hold posts at conservatories. His name, once received like a slab of precious metal, was now received like a slip of blank paper.
    â€œThings will work out,” Caroline said, although “things,” in Shapiro’s estimation, were deteriorating. She touched him less often. Her smiles became increasingly lambent and forbearing. Sometimes she called in the afternoon to say she’d be held up at work. Her voice would be hesitant, apprehensive; her words floated in the air like dying petals while he listened, reluctant to hang up but unable to think of anything to say.
    Recently, he’d been silent for whole evenings, reading, or simply sitting. Rent, plus utilities, plus insurance, minus lessons, plus food—columns of figures went marching through his head, knocking everything else out of it. Once, after he’d had a day of particularly demoralizing students, Caroline perched on the arm of his chair. “Things will work out,” she said, and touched his cheek.
    She might just as well have socked him. “Things will work out?” he said. He was ready to weep with desire that this be true, yet it was manifestly not. “You mean—Ah. Perhaps what you mean is that things will work out for some other species. Or on some other planet. In which case, Caroline, you and I are in complete accord. After all, life moves on.”
    She was staring at him, her hand drawn back as though she’d inadvertently touched a hot stove. Was that his voice? Were those his words? He could hardly believe it himself. Those stiff words, like stiff little soldiers, stiff with shame at the atrocities they were committing.
    â€œLife moves on,” he continued, ruthless and miserable, “but not necessarily to the benefit of the individual, does it? Yes, things will work out eventually, I suppose. But do you think they’ll work out for the guy who sleeps in front of our building? Do you think—” The danger and excitement of probing his terror narrowed his vision into a throbbing circle, from which Caroline, imprisoned, stared back. “Do you think they’ll work out for me?”
    She’d retreated to the other room, and he sat with his head in his hands. Evidently, Caroline herself did not understand or accept the very thing she had just forced him to understand and accept—that he, like most humans, was an experiment that had never been expected to succeed, a little padding around some evolutionary thrust, a scattershot nubbin of DNA. It was a matter of huge biological importance, for some reason, that he be desperate to meet the demands of his life, but it was a matter of no biological importance whatever that he be able to meet them.
    But that week—that very week—an airmail letter arrived from a Richard Penwad inviting Shapiro to play Umberto García-Gutiérrez’s Second Piano Concerto at a Pan-American